Many organizations use complicated information technology and communication infrastructures (“IT infrastructures”) that include, for example, data processing, data storage, and communication-related utilities and components. These infrastructures may include a variety of different hardware and software components. These infrastructures may integrate legacy and state-of-the-art components, and a range of utilities and components serving different functions. Deployment and maintenance of these infrastructures can be complicated and costly.
In numerous areas of business or government there is a need to enable information processes across multiple participating organizations (usually referred to in this disclosure as “entities” or “enterprises”), while addressing requirements regarding, for example, privacy and security. With the significant variation between the components of, and configuration of, IT infrastructures of individual organizations, enabling information processes across a plurality of organizations can be complicated and costly to deploy and maintain. Also, changes to components, utilities, or workflows related to information processes can be very common. These changes can be costly and complicated to implement. Also, many information processes are essential to the entities and therefore implementing changes may require costly workaround systems or processes in order to avoid interruption of availability. In some environments, these workaround systems or processes are not available or are not financially feasible which may result in service interruptions.
Health care is an example of a domain where continuously evolving information systems that are used to publish, store and retrieve data generated, for example, by medical devices and clinical staff. In an effort to increase collaboration and improve patient care, healthcare enterprises are moving towards establishing Health Information Exchanges (“HIEs”) that generally consist of information and communication networks that connect two or more institutions, allowing them to share data. Deployment and management of information systems in HIEs (and network applications in general) can raise significant technology and resource issues in order to address, for example, security requirements, and interoperability.
Not only is there a need to implement information processes across different entities with divergent IT infrastructures, but there is also a need for improving service by, for example, optimizing traffic and applying data analytics across these divergent IT infrastructures. These requirements are generally not met using prior art solutions.
There is a need for computer systems, computer system architectures, and computer implemented information processing methods that address the previously stated requirements.